VISUAL SPACES THAT EXIST BETWEEN THE LAYERS OF MEMORY IN ERSOY ALAP’S PAINTINGS

Prof Dr Kıymet Giray

Realities that get stuck between the layers of memory are visual spaces that hide in the gaps of boundaries of perception beyond the conventional and existing involutions. Memory; where observations accumulate as areas of interest, level of knowledge and culture, and aesthetic preferences, is a web of spaces in which this accumulation is systemised according to the states of time and environment, and moment and space.

Transitions and variations that are ongoing between taught knowledge, conclusions derived as a result of experience, arguments analysed with scientific methods and visuality that is perceived as part of the transience of daily life turn into realities that now and then get stuck in memory. There are many more of these side passages that are concisely defined as “remembering” and that emerge from an action than one might assume. A moment of hearing, seeing or encountering which stimulates visual perception resurrects visual spaces that exist between the layers of memory.

In his abstract expressions where the relationship between nature and object is questioned, Alap comes to terms with visual spaces that exist between memory layers. While visual spaces that appear in the balance of overlapping surfaces of dabs and splotches re-install technology-resisting cross-sections of nature into the visual perception, the geometric forms that interfere with them determine the dominant power of imperative change in his highly-charged abstract expressions created by the contrast between nature and technology.

This dominant power is reinforced by Alap’s distinctive and subjective technique. Strengthening the language of abstract expressions, his technique includes fields of expression that are particular to Alap and accrue by existing within themselves.

Reflecting the dramatic torments of humanity which has either distanced itself or has been removed from nature, Alap paintings wander in the visual spaces that exist between the layers of memory. Nature – now almost completely imaginary – only appears at the conflux where moments transform into memories is a torminous representation of the layer of memory that gets stuck between existence and extinction. Attempting to create visual spaces that revert to cross-sections of nature existing between the layers of memory, and looking for a way out from the world of being entrapped between “keys”, on the border between detachment from nature and living in technology for people born in the last quarter of the 20th century and who live as contemporaries of the 21st century, with his paintings Alap sheds light on the tragic terrene of his own generation that cannot be perceived clearly.

Ersoy Alap convenes images of visual perceptions that conceal hope in cross-sections of nature which still continues its existence amongst layers of memory with his canvases.